Raven's Peace Read online

  “So I’m told,” Henry replied. “Dr. Schult cleared me for active duty, and it seems Base Skyrim’s systems say I’m assigned somewhere. I’m guessing that’s why I’m here?”

  “Of course it’s why you’re here,” Hamilton snapped. “I’ve had a fucking Fabergé egg of a project dropped in my lap: fragile, critical…and no one in Command seems to give a shit. You get to haul it for me.”

  Henry took a moment to process that, then felt a smile spread over his face. There was only one meaning to that: he was getting another ship.

  “What’s the mission?” he asked.

  “The war is over,” Hamilton noted. “That’s the part Command and the General Assembly are paying attention to. So far as we can tell, there isn’t a Kenmiri within a hundred light-years of UPA space. They’ve abandoned occupied planets, garrisons, outposts…even the provincial capital at Ra-7.”

  “I’d heard the reports,” he said. “I didn’t think it was that complete.”

  “Right now, it appears that the Kenmiri Conclave of Warriors is in charge,” she said. “That’s the eldest and best of their Warrior drones. I’m guessing there’s a lot of push and pull between the Warriors and the Artisans, with the Workers stuck in the middle.”

  She made a throwaway gesture.

  “Their problem, not ours.”

  Henry nodded his agreement. The three-way split of the sterile Kenmiri drones had always weirded him out, but if the Conclave of Warriors was in charge, Hamilton’s assessment was probably right.

  All of the drones were easily of human-level intelligence with genetic memories, but each caste was physically and mentally tailored to their purpose. Warriors were bigger, stronger and faster, their minds and bodies programmed for war. Artisans were smaller and smarter, their minds and bodies programmed for delicate construction and technology.

  Workers fell somewhere in between, with the catch that they only had a life expectancy of about fifteen years to a Warrior or Artisan’s seventy. During the Empire, they’d been supported in turn by vast numbers of non-Kenmiri slaves from the occupied worlds.

  “So we’re, what, looting?” he asked. The UPA had been lucky in that their gravity technology was well ahead of the Kenmiri, but the rest of their tech was still behind. Gravity shields had rendered Terran warships nearly invulnerable, allowing them to close with Kenmiri warships that were faster and armed with longer-ranged weapons.

  “I wish,” Hamilton replied. “No. Diplomacy, Colonel. The Vesheron have called a Great Gathering, with all of the people who fought the Kenmiri to meet and discuss the future of the galaxy.”

  “Which Vesheron?” Henry asked carefully. “I mean, hell, technically we’re Vesheron.”

  Vesheron basically just meant rebel. All of the groups that had fought the Kenmiri were Vesheron, and that included at least twenty species and twice that many factions.

  “El-Vesheron,” the Admiral corrected. “We were outside the Empire, so we’re El-Vesheron. Like the Londu or the Terzan.

  “And we have no idea which Vesheron, which I find bloody fascinating,” she concluded. “Given the nature of that fragmented collection of factions, I’m surprised the call was broad enough to prevent us pinpointing a source.

  “But that’s what it looks like we’ve got.”

  Henry nodded slowly. The Vesheron had always been interesting to work with. They’d mostly been equipped with stolen Kenmiri ships, usually the lighter warships, but they’d refitted them to be disturbingly effective.

  The word Vesheron itself, though, was in the Kenmiri trade language, Kem. Kem was the only language the Vesheron factions had in common with each other, let alone the El-Vesheron outsiders who’d joined their fight.

  Plus, well, three-quarters of the species included in the Vesheron could pass for human at a distance—as could the Londu, one of the other two El-Vesheron species. That was a headache that was driving biologists nuts but was thankfully outside of Henry’s area of expertise.

  “It probably came out of the Restan initially,” he said slowly. “They were probably the single most organized of the factions, basically a government in exile.”

  “I’d agree. Not least because the Gathering is going to take place at Resta,” Hamilton told him. “But that could just as easily be because they were the first faction to really reestablish themselves in a position of authority. They’re firmly back in control of their system and even building ships.”

  She waved a hand through the desk’s interface field and threw a hologram of the region into the air. UPA space was blue. Londu space was orange. The old Kenmiri Empire was marked in translucent red.

  Resta flashed purple inside that translucent red. Well into Kenmiri space, it was also almost exactly halfway between Londu and UPA space.

  “I wonder if they’re worrying about us and the Londu,” he murmured.

  “I would in their place, though I know damn well they don’t need to worry about us,” Hamilton replied. “Half of the General Assembly wants to pull in all of our connections and pretend the rest of the galaxy doesn’t exist. Deal with our own problems.

  “The other half is in shock at what we did to the Kenmorad.” She shook her head. “Nobody wants to conquer anybody. We’re going to be watching our own planets and claimed stars.”

  Henry’s gaze focused on the blue area claimed by the United Planets Alliance. Eight member systems, the colonies with tens of millions of people or more. Three dozen outposts or claimed systems, none with more than a couple of million souls and half of them empty.

  There were entire inhabitable worlds inside the zone the UPA had claimed. They had more than enough to keep them busy.

  “But the Resta are right in the middle of everything and feeling threatened,” he concluded. “So, they get a puppet or six to set this Gathering in motion to set up rules and plans going forward.”

  “That’s Intel’s read,” Hamilton confirmed. “You’ll have a briefing waiting for you when you get to your ship, but that’s most of it. The two key things you need to know are that we don’t want to get dragged into anything. We want peace and trade deals, but not enough to want to commit ships or troops.”

  He nodded.

  “And the second?” he asked.

  “Intel is one hundred percent certain the Londu are going to take advantage of the opportunity to press for territorial gains,” she told him. “They’ve already got two near-human species in their space, and they’re not going to blink at integrating a few more if it gets them a few dozen inhabitable worlds and a hundred or so stars.”

  That would probably be more than the Londu could digest, Henry figured, but it would also still only be a fraction of the space up for grabs. The Kenmiri had ruled ten thousand stars, and it looked like they’d already abandoned half of that.

  At least.

  “I see what you mean about Fabergé egg, ser,” he told Hamilton. “It’s going to be a game of intimidation and diplomacy, and I can’t do much of either on my own. I’m assuming there’s going to be a diplomat?”

  “We’re meeting her for dinner in thirty minutes,” the Admiral said calmly. “And the intimidation is going to be a matter of everyone waving their dicks around and saying ‘mine’s bigger.’ We’re the UPA. They know what we bring to the table.”

  “So, how much ‘dick’ am I going to have to swing?” Henry asked bluntly.

  “If some folks had their way, we’d have been sending your ex’s carrier with a full support group,” Hamilton told him. “The Assembly nixed anything more than a single ship—and specifically said no carriers, too.”

  Henry swallowed a snort of amusement at that. The UPA’s carriers weren’t designed for independent deployment, not really, but the four-hundred-meter-long starships definitely made for a solid argument of “mine’s bigger.”

  “Instead, I’m sending the nastiest hunk of metal I’ve got, with a Captain whose name they all know. The man who landed the final blow: Colonel Henry Wong.”

  “I�
��m…not entirely comfortable leaning on that particular reputation, ser,” he admitted.

  “Get comfortable, Colonel,” she told him. “You paid for it. Just like I paid for the reputation of being an ice-cold bitch who’d feed starfighters into the grinder without blinking. If you’ve already bought it, you may as well use it.

  “But most important for now…”

  She pulled two things out from under the desk and slid them across the desk.

  He’d been expecting them both, but they still sent shivers down his spine. The first was the writ, the archaic paper document giving him command of a United Planets Space Force starship.

  The second looked simple. It was simply a piece of white fabric, a wrap that would velcro onto the neck of his uniform sweater. Only one type of person in the entire UPSF wore a turtleneck with a differently colored collar.

  That white collar declared the wearer the Captain of a UPSF starship.

  “We’re giving you Raven,” she told him. “Shiniest and nastiest of the Corvid-class battlecruisers. She isn’t Panther—and believe me, I know that hurts—but she’s the sharpest sword I have to give to the sharpest Captain I have.”

  Henry stared at the writ and the collar for several silent seconds.

  “Well, Colonel? Is it Captain again…or do I need to find another officer for this mission?”

  He grabbed both items and met Sonia Hamilton’s gaze.

  “Captain Wong, reporting for duty, ser.”

  Chapter Five

  The collar and the writ both went into an inner pocket of Henry’s uniform jacket. He was allowed to wear the collar now—as a former starship Captain, he still had uniform turtlenecks with the white collar as part of the garment instead of an add-on—but he wouldn’t feel entitled to it until he’d actually taken command of Raven.

  Admiral Hamilton clearly felt that was lower priority than meeting his passenger and led the way into a private transit pod that whipped them through the station.

  With a gesture in the air, she flipped a three-dimensional image from her internal network to him. It was hard to judge size from a hologram, but he guessed the woman to be tall and slim, a sharp-faced individual with shoulder-length blond hair and a piercing gaze.

  “Piercing” looked like a good descriptor of her in general, and he suspected that was at least partially intentional.

  “This is Em Sylvia Todorovich,” Hamilton told him. “UPA Diplomatic Corps. For this mission, she’s acting as our plenipotentiary Ambassador.”

  With the name and the face, Henry’s internal network easily pulled Em Todorovich’s official record. Ten years younger than him, she’d entered the diplomatic corps directly from university—on the exact day, in fact, that he and Hamilton had watched the rest of Rygel’s fighter complement die at Procyon.

  “She’s from Epsilon Eridani,” Hamilton told him. “Long tradition of service in the Eridani government and in the Novaya Imperiya before that.”

  Henry snorted.

  “I can’t blame anyone for that,” he pointed out. “My great-grandfather dropped on Tau Ceti with the USMC.”

  “And my also-American great-grandmother led the relief fleet for the EU under a Canadian nationality everyone knew was a lie,” Hamilton said dryly. “If we’re going to hold the Unity War against people, we’ll be here all day.”

  He chuckled as Todorovich’s record unspooled in front of him. She’d served as an aide to the Eridani General Assembly Member during the early years of the war against the Kenmiri. Then a junior negotiator on several trade missions through the UPA. And then…

  “Wait, she was part of the Vesheron missions?” he asked.

  “The junior-most of four negotiators on the second delegation,” Hamilton told him. “She spent five years in Kenmiri space working to help keep the Vesheron factions pointed at the same enemy—and if you haven’t made it that far, she was then joint Ambassador to the Londu with Em Karl Rembrandt.

  “Rembrandt’s retired, which means she’s the only diplomat we’ve got that knows the Londu and she’s probably the best we’ve got that knows the Vesheron. Todorovich is probably more critical to this mission than you are, Captain Wong.”

  Henry shook his head at the memory of Em Karl Rembrandt. Panther had been one of four battlecruisers on the extraction mission after the Ambassador had been captured by the Kenmiri. They’d got him out…but he’d left both legs behind.

  He’d have taken Rembrandt over anyone else in the UPA’s diplomatic corps, but he could understand why the old man had retired.

  “I figured that from the beginning, ser,” he pointed out. “I didn’t know she’d worked with Rembrandt.” He paused, pulling up the data. “Sorry, joint Ambassadors alongside Rembrandt?”

  Rembrandt was almost twice Todorovich’s age and had been the star diplomat of the UPA. If he’d accepted the woman as his equal, she was going to be one tough lady.

  “Bingo. So, don’t shove your foot in it, Captain. If Em Todorovich decides she wants a different driver, well…” Hamilton chuckled. “Well, it’s too late for that, but she can damn well make your life miserable.”

  Henry smiled thinly.

  He couldn’t say, after all, that the Admiral was the more likely of the two of them to shove a foot in it.

  The restaurant on deck two had clearly been expecting them. While technically a civilian establishment, Maya’s was also one of the top five eating establishments on a military base with a hundred thousand spacers and officers.

  They were quite familiar with the concept of “Admiral’s priority,” and a white-suited host retrieved them from the end of the already-short line within seconds of their arrival.

  “Admiral Hamilton, Colonel Wong,” the androgynous, shaven-headed host said with a small bow. “Welcome, welcome. Your table is waiting for you.”

  The host led them in, past others waiting for their own reservations—but they saw Hamilton’s stars, and no one complained.

  “The Ambassador’s staff just updated us via the datanet that she’s running slightly late and will be here in just over five minutes,” the host told the two officers as they led the way through the restaurant. A mix of red and gold silk fabrics created decorative cubicles around the tables, and the sound of running water permeated the place.

  There was only one fountain in the middle of the main space, though. The rest of the water sound in the restaurant was artificial—a subtler and more pleasing form of white-noise generator, Henry suspected.

  They were ushered into an end table with more solid-looking walls than the rest of the dining cubicles as a strong smell of mixed spices wafted out from the kitchen.

  “I’ll have a server bring you water to start,” the host told them as they seated the pair. “I’ll be waiting for Em Todorovich myself. She won’t go astray.”

  “Thank you,” Hamilton told their guide.

  The host disappeared before either of them could say more. Henry shook his head as he inspected the table. Wood wasn’t cheap on a space station, but there were vast plantations of both local and Terran trees on Sandoval to supply the system’s needs.

  This table, though. He poked at one of the small burn marks, and his internal network cheerfully assessed it as having been varnished over. Repeatedly. Most of the varnish on the table would have been removed, but the pockmark from the burn kept the layers.

  “This table is older than I am,” he observed. “I think it might be older than Skyrim.”

  “The first Chef Maya apparently brought the tables from her mother’s restaurant in India,” Hamilton told him. “That restaurant had been around since the twenty-second century. At least some of the tables are over two hundred years old.”

  She rapped the table. “Solid enough.”

  Their water materialized a moment later, and Henry barely had time to take a sip before their guest arrived.

  The impression of sharpness he’d picked up from Sylvia Todorovich’s image was an underestimate. She was at least ten centimet
ers taller than he was but probably weighed twenty kilograms less. Everything about her face and body was sharp, nearly gaunt in the hard lines of her bones and her gaze as she met his eyes.

  “So, this is your captain, Admiral Hamilton?” Todorovich asked, her words as swift and sharp as her movements.

  “Colonel Henry Wong, meet Em Sylvia Todorovich,” Hamilton replied. “Ambassador plenipotentiary for the United Planets Alliance to the Vesheron factions.”

  “It’s just the Vesheron,” Todorovich corrected as she took a seat. “The word includes an equivalent to ‘factions’ in its meaning. Calling them the Vesheron factions is like calling us the UPA Alliance.”

  “Fair.” The Admiral gestured her concession. “I am not a linguist, Ambassador. Neither is the Colonel.”

  “I speak Kem,” Henry pointed out. “The use of the extra word is to clarify to English speakers a meaning they may not pick up from the Kem word. Clarity is often a more important part of communication than the correct use of language.”

  The Ambassador laughed, a crisp and precise sound.

  “Teta,” she told him. The Kem word meant “struck” and served much the same purpose in formal combat contests for the Kenmiri warrior caste as touché did in Terran fencing.

  “Only a quarter of officers serving alongside the Vesheron bothered to learn Kem,” she continued after a moment. “That always struck me as unwise. Translation software is powerful and fast…but far from perfect.”

  “Most officers in the area of operations didn’t have time to pick up a new language alongside their duties,” Henry replied. “We were there to fight a war. So long as some of us could validate the translation and talk to people face to face, most of our officers could communicate by computer and their actions.

  “It was more important that we fought by their side than that we could engage in cross-lingual punning.”

  Todorovich leaned back in her chair, studying him in silence with those piercing eyes.

  “He’ll do, Admiral,” she said. “Where did you find him?”